Likely the first mention of the “Stingaree district” in academia, Elizabeth McPhail’s 1974 article for The Journal of San Diego History, “‘Shady Ladies in the ‘Stingaree District’,” has been cited in nearly every subsequent mention of the long-gone neighborhood. It remains, perhaps, the greatest examination of the general history of the district, beginning in the 1870s and continuing to the fall of the district in 1912. However, as most of the primary source material related to the Stingaree no longer exists, her article leans heavily on the records of Walter Bellon, the city health inspector that tore down the district, and the memoirs of Jerry MacMullen.[1] MacMullen, however, was only a young boy when the district came down, his memories largely being of the traces that held on after the closing (and, furthermore, those that were pointed out to him by the adults who cared to do so). As a result, women like Ida Bailey, a former notorious madam who stayed in town long enough for MacMullen to see her shuffling down the street, have a disproportionate footprint in both McPhail’s article and the plaques that were placed on various buildings in the Gaslamp district.
If you read between the lines, of course, the implication that organized criminal activity and corruption are a major part of the Stingaree story are often made in both McPhail’s and resulting pieces, but no concrete answers are ever really provided. This, of course, is one of the problems that arises from using personal records to build the backbone of research— people often leave out the parts that would criminalize others or themselves, instead approaching it with a certain tongue-in-cheek attitude that leaves the identity of culpable parties to guesswork for the researcher and reader. Besides— there’s no way to tell the story of organized crime without recognizing that the money earned by sex workers helped to facilitate the machine as a whole.
(Though the men are the focus of the photograph, you can see at least six– possibly seven women in the picture if you look closely around the edges.) Riis, Jacob August. Bandits’ Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street, New York [Gelatin silver print, 1888]. Museum of Modern Art. Restored by Adam Cuerden, Wikimedia Commons.
This tight-lipped nature is partially due to the fact that sex work is and has always been viewed as a sensitive and salacious topic— the result, of course, being a one-dimensional portrayal of their lives. As Clare McKanna wrote in his article “Prostitutes, Progressives, and Police” (1989), also published in the Journal of San Diego History, “‘Prostitute’ is a word loaded with emotion that offers a variety of images from a vision of loveliness, to the madam who lived a life of opulence in a large house known to everyone. There is another image of the prostitute that paints a picture of a broken home, early sexual advances by males, alcohol abuse, substandard living quarters (as depicted), dirty degrading work, poor health, and high mortality.”[2] Even in the late 1980s, McKanna fails to suggest that these women were more than the attributes we ascribe to their profession as outsiders, distilling them into two categories that oversimplify— or fail to describe— their lives, as my research endeavors to demonstrate. They were, without a doubt, more than the dichotomy of “successful/broken” that he proposes, with varying levels of agency and life experiences. Recognizing this inaccurate image of sex workers that had previously been the norm, historian Marian Wood Hill acknowledged their multifaceted identities in her 1993 book, Their Sisters’ Keepers (1993), saying that “[p]ublicly, the prostitute was a harlot, a woman-for-hire, but privately she might be a mother, sister, daughter, and friend, as well as a wife, lover, or business associate.”[3] Still, the term “business associate,” I’d like to add, is a rather understated way of conveying the wide wide-ranging set of illegal trades outside of sex work (smuggling, theft, etc.) that many sex workers engaged in, as well as the bribes they paid out and the information they wielded from their intimate knowledge of the underworld.
This isn’t to imply that research on women’s involvement in underground economies by way of their stigmatized profession and/or personal relations hasn’t been done before, albeit at the localized level. For example, in his book City of Eros (1992) Timothy Gilfoyle explains that the relationship between the notorious Tammany Hall political machine interacted with organized crime on an individualized basis, with additional “informal and fluid” bonds to sex work as a way to assist in financing said criminal operations.[4] And, once in the life, women often found the societal bounds of the profession inescapable, as Gilfoyle states, “[n]ot even a poor working class-female [could] escape prostitution, marry, and be accepted into working-class life,”[5] pushing them to find both kinship and additional income from sources other than familial or spousal support in swaths of territory under the control of whatever gang happened to control the area.
Within these criminal organizations, of course, women were very rarely at the top of the food chain. The bonds the women formed and fostered inside their neighborhoods, however, were as individualized as the relations Gilfoyle mentions between politicians and criminals in New York, ranging from selling properties to the police to marrying men high up in the local gangs— and, I would argue, just as important. Amidst the constantly-shifting power struggle between the “vice” element and the law that the Gilded Age inherently symbolizes, these relationships both sustained them and provided them with invaluable security as they made their forays into the deep waters of the crime-ridden Stingaree district. Whether they were attempting to financial bolster themselves, have a good time, or simply survive, their circumstances and stories are both alike and similar in the fact that they were all shaped and influenced by the environment they were, essentially, trapped within.
[1] McPhail, “Shady Ladies in the ‘Stingaree District’ When the Red Lights Went Out in San Diego.” Journal of San Diego History, 20, no. 2. (Spring 1974).
[2] McKanna, Clare V. “Prostitutes, Progressives, and Police.” The Journal of San Diego History 35, no. 1 (Winter 1989).
[3] Hill, Marilynn Wood. Their Sisters’ Keepers: Prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 319.
[4] Gilfoyle, Timothy J. City of Eros : New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920. (First edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), 256-257.
[5] Ibid, 271.